One of the most useless project management conventions I have ever worked with is the status stoplight or RAG status. From a simplicity perspective, it is designed to convey a general state of the project. Green means things are “OK”. Amber means things aren’t that OK. Red means things are not OK at all. The…
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When Task Estimates Fail
Of course, the only valid reason for estimation is prediction. We want to predict the cost and duration of delivery for some set of working software capabilities. If we didn’t care about time and cost, we wouldn’t waste our time trying to predict. We realize that software task estimates alone are insufficient for this prediction.…
Fail Fast Furiously
The other day, I read a tweet by @gnat (nat torkington), saying that fail fast as a mantra was misleading – because the objective was to learn, not to fail. Actually when I exhort people to fail fast, the objective is to retire a risk. Sure, learning is important, but what is really important to…
Project Portfolio Management
Projects are not assets, they are liabilities. Like a future obligation, or a goal. When you manage a portfolio of liabilities, they have to be offset by assets. The process of project portfolio management is simply the management of flow of expenditure projected by each project, in time, compared with the projected flow of funding…
Product Management
Product Management is something that should be easy to understand. The highest level goals of product management should be easy to articulate. 1) build a valuable product 2) maintain the value of a product relative to its customer community 3) manage the investment in the product, to ensure the best possible return
When Firing Is Better
Sometimes it would just be easier, and better for all parties if we were honest and just “Fired their sorry asses!” It would be easier for management, because there is less corporate drama around firing and hiring than around a reorg, or implementing alternative staffing models, and RIF’s are either good (when the economy is…
Product Centric
I work in an environment that is somewhat dominated by a project governance mentality. What does this mean? What it means to me is this – that our diligence is focused on spending rather than on asset creation. Why is this significant? Because it changes how we focus the decisions in the process of software…
What I Have Done
Recently I have had to look back on my career and remind myself what I have done. I am leading a challenging project, and at times it feels like I have team members and customers projecting their expectations for how the work will be executed. Sometimes amid the cacophony of voices, I have to remind…
Product Portfolio Management
Product Portfolio If you want to manage a portfolio of software products, it is necessary to understand the organizational goals that are met by those software products. The product portfolio is a vehicle for understanding the ongoing investment in development or deployment of software assets. It requires an ability to measure the value of software…
Agile Is Not For Everyone
OH: (on twitter) “Convinced. Everyone that says “agile doesn’t work” or even “agile doesn’t work for us” just doesn’t know what it means to be agile.” I read this on Twitter over the weekend (12/17/11). It really got me fired up. Mind you, I am an avid agilist. The point is, that some situations…